Child-care charity shutting historic campus

Park Ridge facility to close

not enough funding for planned 'foster care village'

Girls in the 1960s pose at the Park Ridge School for Girls. Now known as The Youth Campus, the residence for state wards will shutter by June. (Tribune file photo)

More than a century ago, under the guidance of Jane Addams, an orphanage in Park Ridge sought to innovate how children without parents were raised by placing them in a familylike setting in a community of cottages.

But like Addams' Hull House, the residential facility for state wards now known as The Youth Campus has fallen victim to budget woes and falling private donations.

Founded as the Illinois Industrial School for Girls in the 1870s with an aim to help girls who had been orphaned by the Civil War, the establishment operated in Evanston for 30 years before moving to the Park Ridge campus, where each cottage was overseen by a housemother. The organization began admitting boys in 1980 and later focused on aiding abused and neglected children who had been removed from their homes.

Recently, the nonprofit's leaders announced ambitious plans to convert to a so-called "foster care village" which, in a nod to its roots, aimed to provide a more familylike setting.

Instead, its population having dwindled to just a small number of adolescent girls, The Youth Campus abruptly announced this month that it will close its doors for good by June.

"It's just a tough time being a nonprofit," said Kevin Buggy, co-chairman of the organization's board of directors. "No one is to blame. It's a sign of the economic times."

The Youth Campus recently determined that its Park Ridge flagship facility stood to run annual deficits, possibly reaching several hundred thousand dollars over time — something board members did not foresee when they decided a year ago to switch to the new model, Buggy said.

He said the nonprofit organization tried to work with the Illinois Department of Children and Family Services to create a sustainable financial plan going forward, but ultimately the board decided it could not swallow the large losses.

At least 75 percent of the organization's funding came from DCFS, with the rest coming from grants, private donations and fundraisers, Buggy said. But the state child-welfare agency's funding formula would have changed if The Youth Campus had finished its conversion.

Residential program providers are paid a certain rate to house and care for children, depending on the services provided, said DCFS spokesman Kendall Marlowe. Under a foster care model — where foster parents live on site with foster children — rates are typically paid on a monthly basis, though the nonprofit managing the case receives a small incremental amount, he added.

Marlowe said his agency never had any problems with The Youth Campus. The nonprofit intends to continue to operate its Chicago office, which offers nonresidential services to 120 foster care children and at-risk families, and will continue to be a licensed private child-welfare agency in the coming year, Marlowe said.

"This is a financial situation. ... It does not relate to performance issues," Marlowe said.

The girls who had been housed at the Park Ridge location have already been transferred to other organizations. Two foster children and their foster parent will stay on-site until the school year is over, Buggy said. They will not be split up when they leave and will continue to work with the organization through its Chicago office, he added.

For the community of Park Ridge, the end of the residential facility also represents the loss of a tie to history.

Several of the one- and two-story cottages on the property are on the National Register of Historic Places. Of four organizations that cared for dependent children in Park Ridge in the early 1900s, only The Youth Campus remains, according to the Park Ridge Historical Society.

"It's kind of a sad thing to see," Judy Barclay, chairwoman of the Park Ridge Historic Preservation Commission, said of the closing. "That whole site has been a fixture in Park Ridge."

Most recently, the facility served teenage girls with severe emotional and behavioral problems, but Buggy said it did not have the institutional setting to handle them. He said that prompted the board to switch the model to a foster care village.

Over the last several months, six of the cottage-style homes on the campus — now down to 11 acres from its original 40 — had been undergoing refurbishments so young boys and girls could move in with foster parents.

The idea was to bring a cadre of support staff like therapists, counselors and other professionals on-site and integrate the foster children into the community through the school system and other activities. The program was to be fully operational by July.

The news that The Youth Campus site would instead close came as a surprise to many in the community who were supportive of the plan, said Ald. Joe Sweeney, whose ward includes the facility.

"It was a change that really enhanced what they were trying to do and made that campus a more neighborhood-friendly operation," Sweeney said. "It was a different type of child that was going to come in there; not the troubled ones they had before."

But when the new, grim financial picture came to light in recent weeks, the board stopped hiring and bringing kids to the campus. Some of the Park Ridge employees will transfer to the Chicago office; others will move to different organizations, but some jobs will be eliminated, Buggy said.

So far, the board has been in contact with some entities possibly interested in the property, such as the Park Ridge Park District, but hasn't yet made any decisions about what will happen to the campus.

"We're very saddened by it," Buggy said. "(DCFS and The Youth Campus) both worked hard, and it just didn't happen."